Tag: #Learning

We had a fantastic two days at Microsoft London Paddington Offices on Friday 26 and Saturday 27 January. It was the first time we had our event across the whole Microsoft Business Solutions platform and over 2 days, Friday afternoon and Saturday.

This time, we had a very special guest: James Phillips, Microsoft Corporate Vice President and the head of Microsoft Business Solutions (including Dynamics 365) Globally. He flew from the US to attend the event and show his support to the community.

Q&A with James Phillips

To check all the photos and a chronological report on the event, please read my LinkedIn article here:

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We have just had our first CRM Saturday Bootcamp at Microsoft UK London Paddington offices this Saturday, 22nd July 2017. It has been a lot of hard work for everyone at CRM Saturday especially the trainers: Neil Parkhurst, Janet Rob, Raz Choudry and Baris Kanilca. As for me, I did 16K steps just walking between the various rooms ensuring all sessions are adhering to our agenda times. Personally, my sessions both overrun by few minutes and some of my track attendees missed part of their breaks as I got carried away! For this, I’m sorry 🙂 It has been a seriously fun event with some excellent attendees.

Not only we had 110 excellent attendees @ our free #MSDyn365 #CRMSaturday Bootcamp. We also raised £1,421 for the London Fire Fund, British Red Cross.

We learnt Dynamics 365 together in 3 different parallel tracks. There was a lot of excellent networking as well as some great fun at the various breaks and the Raffle ticket awards.

Some of our attendees even went back home with an XBOX S One, an Amazon Alexa/Echo and other prizes. What a day!

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A good place for everyone starting with Microsoft Dynamics CRM or who wants to move into Dynamics 365 domain is the Dynamics 365 Customer Centre. This is aimed as Dynamics 365 Customers including users and advanced users. This is not a Technical or IT professionals focused site as there are other sites dedicated to these subjects.

In this post, I’d like to introduce Partner Next and its free training videos section. You can see the full list of Dynamics 365 training videos on this Partner Next section. The Videos cover various Dynamics areas including Customer Service, Operations, Sales, Financials and a lot more.

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For all Dynamics partners, Microsoft is offering a free training program to on-board new consultants and developers in your practice called Dynamics 365 Accelerate. The training program gets professionals ready for certification and project implementation after a 30 to 45 days’ cycle where professionals learn the best practices of implementation thru case studies and a sandbox environment.

Majority of the programs are virtual, requiring no travel. Microsoft next wave starts in May with the following programs:

Now that you have a Dynamics 365 instance, you need to start following a step by step training or guide to learn Dynamics 365 functionality. I strongly suggest using Microsoft Dynamics Learning Portal as it has training videos, virtual sessions, live online training and training guides and content for Dynamics 365 across the various modules: Sales, Services, Field Services, Project Services, Marketing, etc. This is all delivered through what is called “Dynamics Learning Plans”.

In summary, the Dynamics Learning portal offers two types of learning plans:

My Learning Plans have an intuitive, user-friendly UI that provides more flexibility and customization without sacrificing current features. My Learning Plans are offered in two views:

Tracks and Capabilities view offers users the option of viewing a taxonomy-driven format that displays the training assets in your learning plan alphabetically by track and capability. While users will not be able to edit from within this plan, they will have the ability to track progress, print, export and apply filters.

My suggestion is that you choose the Readiness Learning Plan, select levels 100 and 200,

select “Application Consultant” role

and then select the business application you are most interested in (Sales, Customer services, etc.)

Here are the results that come back from these selections:

Once you got the results, you can start adding these results to your learning plan using the “+” under my learning plan in the bottom right hand corner.

In my next blog post, I will discuss more about how to gain access to Dynamics Learning Portal if you don’t have it through your Microsoft partner or customer account. I will also cover the next learning and development areas and options available to progress your career in Dynamics 365.

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This is my first post in a series of articles I’ll be publishing to help new comers into the Dynamics 365 domain learn the technology and the platform to become Dynamics 365 consultants, developers and Architects. This series is aimed at graduates looking to study and learn Dynamics 365 so they can become consultants or analysts in this striving and growing market. It is also aimed at other IT consultants who are moving into Dynamics 365 from other CRM and ERP platforms such as SAP, Oracle, SalesForce, etc. The series might also be helpful to junior consultants at the early stages of their career in Dynamics 365.

So, if any of the above applies to you, you must have wondered what are the first steps to learn Dynamics 365 so I can sell the platform, implement it or even just talk confidently about it.

My recommendation is that you should always focus on learning the functionality and studying the capability of the solution before trying to learn how to extend the platform with custom code and custom development, even if you are a seasoned .Net developer. The reason for this is that you should always try to use Dynamics 365 built-in functionality and features to its maximum (and there is a lot to utilise here) before you consider writing any custom code or extending the platform with .net plugins, custom workflow activities, custom actions or even JavaScript web resources. The organisation that has acquired Dynamics 365 licenses to utilise the platform is expecting to be get the best out of the built-in functionalities and capabilities before paying for expensive custom development that would require even more costs in the future to maintain, support and upgrade. Finally, with the Dynamics 365 Cloud has now become the norm, as opposed to Dynamics 365 on-premise option, you have twice a year upgrade to your Dynamics 365 instance so it’s best practice, Microsoft’s recommendation and for the benefit for everyone that your Dynamics 365 solution sticks to the out of the box capabilities and utilise built-in features as much as possible.

This is a long but really important introduction as the above could literally shape your career in Dynamics and you should start on the right foot by following the best practices and Microsoft recommendation for implementing Dynamics 365 solutions.

Now, the first ever step you should do to start learning Dynamics 365 is to get yourself a Dynamics 365 CRM Online (Cloud) instance. You can get this from your organisation / company where you work, or alternatively if this is not available, then you should subscribe to a free 30 (or 90) days trial Dynamics 365 instance. The simplest action is to get the 30 days free trial using the following link:

If the above link doesn’t work, you can search online for Dynamics CRM Online Free trial and get the relevant page for the free trial in your country. If all of this doesn’t work, please comment below and I can send you an invitation for a 30 days free trial (subject to availability) from my Microsoft partner account.

The other option to the Dynamics 365 30 days free trial is to get a 90 days free trial Microsoft Dynamics 365 tenant with office 365 using the Microsoft Demos website. This option is only available for Microsoft Partners though.

In my next article, I will be taking you through the step by step guide on where to start your learning of Dynamics 365 and how to apply your learning onto a Dynamics 365 solution built on your new free trial instance you have.

Hope this helps!

Note: You can always register with the free Dynamics 365 Mentoring programme on CRM Boutique and get help from a Dynamics 365 expert as your career Mentor